3 ms·

I don't have the greatest grasp of licences but once they go open and take pull requests they can't go back can they? Are they even allowed? It would mean binn

I don't have the greatest grasp of licences but once they go open and take pull requests they can't go back can they? Are they even allowed? It would mean binning the project and starting from scratch privately right? At the risk of being accused of stealing the open contributed code.

eitland 13y ago
Short answer: Depends on copyright assignments or not. (I'm very sure however that they have this worked out. )
lucian1900 13y ago
Everything else they've released has been Apache2, so assuming that, they could decide stop releasing new versions of it. They couldn't "take back" the versions already released, though.
skywhopper 13y ago
My understanding is that the copyright owner may do whatever they please, including selling modified versions with their own custom proprietary changes, or maintaining multiple versions under differing licenses. However, it's true that once they've released the code under an open license, anyone who has saved a copy of the code may release their own forked version in the future, regardless of what the copyright owner does with their version, so long as the forker continues to follow the terms of that license for the code still under copyright of the original owner. New code under the forker's copyright may be released under other licenses if the forker chooses, etc, etc.
bunderbunder 13y ago
They own the copyright, so they're free to do what they want with the code. That's why dual licensing models (like that of MySQL) are possible. However, code that's been distributed under an open license stays that way. So Microsoft could add a commercial license, and even stop making updates under an open license. But if they do that, then there's nothing stopping the community from moving forward with their own fork of the open source version. If I recall correctly, the Darwin operating system might be a good example of how that sort of dynamic could play out.

eitland 13y ago

Short answer: Depends on copyright assignments or not. (I'm very sure however that they have this worked out. )

lucian1900 13y ago

Everything else they've released has been Apache2, so assuming that, they could decide stop releasing new versions of it. They couldn't "take back" the versions already released, though.

skywhopper 13y ago

My understanding is that the copyright owner may do whatever they please, including selling modified versions with their own custom proprietary changes, or maintaining multiple versions under differing licenses. However, it's true that once they've released the code under an open license, anyone who has saved a copy of the code may release their own forked version in the future, regardless of what the copyright owner does with their version, so long as the forker continues to follow the terms of that license for the code still under copyright of the original owner. New code under the forker's copyright may be released under other licenses if the forker chooses, etc, etc.

bunderbunder 13y ago

They own the copyright, so they're free to do what they want with the code. That's why dual licensing models (like that of MySQL) are possible. However, code that's been distributed under an open license stays that way. So Microsoft could add a commercial license, and even stop making updates under an open license. But if they do that, then there's nothing stopping the community from moving forward with their own fork of the open source version. If I recall correctly, the Darwin operating system might be a good example of how that sort of dynamic could play out.